In a report released by research firm Canalys, the Q4 results of last year have finally allowed a complete tally for 2011. There have been some surprising developments and others that were expected. Looking at the table below, you’ll see that for the first time, smartphone shipments have crossed the global shipments of desktop pc, laptops, netbooks and tablets combined.

The annual growth of smartphones is quite high, with almost 63% increase over last year. This has allowed for a global shipment of 487.7 million smartphones, compared to 414.6 million client PCs. Of course, the real star of the show are tablet computers, that have seen an astronomically high 274% increase over last year.

“In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads (tablets),” said Chris Jones, Canalys VP and Principal Analyst. “But pads have had negligible impact on smart phone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011.”

Coming back to smartphones, it seems that the sudden increase in popularity of tablets hasn’t affected the smartphone market. The competition among the major platforms seems to be one-sided, though, as Android smartphones had the lion’s share of shipments, with almost 49% global market share. Apple comes in at a distant second with 19% followed closely (and surprisingly) by Symbian. BlackBerry seems to be strolling along at 10.5%; not nearly as bad as everyone was making it out to be, but still nowhere near Apple or Android.

It’s no surprise that geeks like me are not necessarily big on fashion. When I don’t have to attend events or meetings, I much prefer being in my jeans and a Polo. However, every once in a while (mainly during shopping festivals with super discounted prices), I’d step into Bloomingdales or Harvey Nichols and treat myself to a couple of nice shirts or even a blazer ( if they’re still called that). Now here’s the thing- different people have different opinions on my purchases. What one person absolutely loves, gets laughed at by another. In the world of fashion, there is no science and there are no analytical benchmarks to prove one thing is better than the other. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

The intro above might seem a bit strange on a tech website but serves a purpose- it’s required reading for the Porsche Design BlackBerry P9981 that I am reviewing today. Ever since it was officially unveiled, I have read countless opinions on how sexy or how ugly the P9981 is. I too, considered the device unattractive when pictures of it were leaked on the web a few months back. But then I held it at it’s launch event in Dubai and suddenly, my opinion started changing. And after playing with it for a few days, my beloved Bold 9900 suddenly feels cheap.

Packaged in a nice box that is almost the size of something you get when buying shoes, the P9981 prepares you with what it has to offer right from the magnetic latch of the packaging. The top layer has the phone and the charging dock nicely cuddled up while going a layer deep reveals the Porsche branded battery (same capacity as the Bold 9900), your membership card and some manuals. Going deeper to the last layer unveils the premium headset, USB cable and four charging plugs serving different parts of the world. Interestingly, no holster is included in the package which tells you that this is not a device that you want to keep hidden inside anything. You can watch our unboxing video here.

The Porsche Design P9981 is essentially the BlackBerry Bold 9900 but in a chassis designed by the company that is associated with being über cool. Gone is the plasticy back and the brushed aluminum looking antenna band, replaced by real premium leather back cover and a shiny stainless steel band. Even the individual keys on the P9981’s keyboard are made of metal instead of plastic. Although it might not look very comfortable, the keyboard on the P’9981 is very easy to type on- not as good as the Bold 9900 but still pretty good. Above the keyboard, you have the four traditional BlackBerry keys and the trackpad- all of which are taller in size and easier to press. The hard metallic edges along with the leather back give the P9981 a feel that is like no other Smartphone. You know you’re carrying something that is premium.

This new enclosure is slightly bigger in size compared to the Bold 9900 but not much has changed as far as layout and positioning of buttons and connectors is concerned. The MicroSD slot has been moved a bit higher making it easier to manage your memory card and you no longer need to remove the battery to access it either. Other than that, all the other buttons and connectors are pretty much in the same spot as the Bold 9900. One change I would have liked to see is the notification LED moved a bit higher so that it sits between the top and front sides of the device- or possibly around the navigation pad.

LG has recently unveiled the X3, one the first smartphones to pack a quad-core processor. This follows in the footsteps of the earlier HTC Edge (or  Endeavor), and the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III. Whether the world needs the power is apparently beside the point.

The X3 also packs a Tegra 3 graphics power plant, a generous 4.7″ high-resolution display at 720P resolution, an eight meg snapper on the back and an internal 16GB memory (which can be increased; microSD slot) to complete a rather impressive spec-sheet. And the most impressive part is still managing to cram in all those goodies while keeping thickness at 9mm.

Industry experts expect LTE connectivity along with the standard Bluetooth and WiFi, and the OS to be Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Expect to hear more on the X3 at the Mobile World Congress next month.

The Porsche Designed BlackBerry P’9981 has officially landed in our office and like any fashion product, it has it’s share of fans and critics. It will take us a few days to properly use the device and give our honest opinion but until then, enjoy the unboxing of this deluxe item designed by Porsche Design and RIM.

Please note that the onboard memory on the P’9981 is 8GB and not 4GB as mentioned in the video.

During this year’s CES, Intel has announced a new multi-year, multi-device partnership with Motorola Mobility whereby the Motorola’s next generation of smartphones will be powered by Intel’s Atom processors.

Currently Motorola uses both Texas Instruments and Qualcomm for its existing smartphones. This new partnership will mean that Intel will also enter the processor supplying fleet for Motorola Mobility, which might soon end up getting acquired by Google once the deal is approved by US federal regulators.

For now, we’re expecting to see the new Motorola handsets to come out in the 2nd half of this year. These handsets will be powered by the Intel Atom Z2460 processor with hyper-threading blitzing at 1.6 GHz, and will most likely be  running Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

I think CodeYear.com is one of the most exciting and innovative ideas that have come along in a very long time. As I write this it says on that page, “236,059 people have decided to learn to code in 2012.” That’s an amazing number of people.

CodeYear is a project by Codecademy.com to try to get more people writing programming code, or at least to get a taste for what it means to program.

I signed up even though I’ve got quite a bit of programming experience already, and I really hope you do too. If you’ve never written a single bit or byte of code, perhaps never even thought about it, then you’re the perfect candidate for this project.

If you have no experience of computer programming, it basically involves writing commands that the computer will understand to get it to carry out certain tasks. That could be to display a web page, type an article, play a game or just make a phone call with your smartphone. Everything you do with a gadget today requires software and software has to be programmed. Software is clearly of critical importance today. Just look at what sells a smartphone today. Sure, having a big screen and fast processor helps, but having a lot of apps,  great apps, available for it is a competitive advantage and arguably as important.

I started out programming using BASIC in my high school’s computer lab. As I quickly got the bug, so to speak, I moved on with Turbo Pascal and remember trying to develop an application like Microsoft Paint. And I did it too. My application may not have been as robust as Paint (in other words it crashed a lot), but it could do a heck of a lot more than Microsoft’s application. Then I moved on with Assembly language, C and some C++. In more recent years it’s been PHP and ActionScript that has kept me busy.

But I am not a programmer. Not so much because I don’t make a living out of writing code but because it’s something I’d not like to do to as a job, nor would I like to spend that much time writing code. To me hacking together some code is fun and something I enjoy doing from time to time but that’s about it.

I am however very grateful that I got to spend a lot of time writing code earlier on in my life because I think it’s given me a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for what it takes to develop an application, whether it’s for a computer, a smartphone, or the web.

So come on, sign up for CodeYear.com and get programming. If you do continue on to actually developing a piece of software, let us know and we’ll share it here with others. I think once you give software programming a go, the bug will bite you. And this is the good kind of bug.

Photo by James Cridland.

Most of you reading this own a smartphone or two, or three. Having a smartphone, regardless of brand, has become almost like a human right in large parts of the world and no doubt, smartphone sales are booming. IDC expects 472 smartphones to be sold worldwide this year, with Android and iOS being the two dominating platforms.

But even with booming smartphone sales, let’s not forget that smartphones are still a small part of all mobile phones in the world. You could be forgiven to think otherwise reading the headlines in magazines and tech websites.

Almost 6 billion mobile phone subscribers

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) expects [PDF] 5.9 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide in 2011. I know it’s a bit of apples and oranges, but this means only about 8% of all mobile handsets in the world are smartphones.

No doubt, this share will just keep increasing. IDC expects smartphone sales to almost double to 982 million by end of 2015. That’s a lot of smartphones.

But some of the functionality of smartphones, like GPS, web browsing and email has trickled down to another type of mobile phone, usually called feature phone.  In fact, over 70% of mobile handsets that shipped this year were feature phones. This number is expected to at least remain stable if not increase.

So as much as us tech writers want to talk about smartphones, when you read some headlines about record smartphone sales, think again and remember that however smart they are, they are just a small portion of the market.

What is it that makes a smartphone so, well, smart? I would imagine that most of us are lured by the big and bright screens, the fast processors, large storage capacity, fast mobile data connections, and more. To me what makes the smartphone smart is the apps.

But more than anything, for most customers, we’re probably lured by the idea of having the latest and greatest. That’s the way it so often is with tech, wouldn’t you say?

Switching to feature phone?

I can admit that I’ve thought about dumping my smartphone at times, instead going for the week-long battery life that a feature phone can offer, and often better voice quality as well. But as much as those things appeal to me, whenever I’ve tried to live with a feature phone, there’s something I’ve missed from the smartphone and I ended up switching back.

Right now, I am still in love with my iPhone 4S. It fulfills a range of roles, and has in some ways taken over what I do with a computer as well as tablet.

But a feature phone will beat it on several key points. And for all its wonderful features, the iPhone 4S, as well as all other smartphones, are still a small percentage of all mobile phones sold in the world.

That’s a reality worth keeping in mind.

Photo credit re-ality.

Intel has been behind the curve when it comes to mobile processors in smartphones and tablets. While their success in the desktop and mobile processors for laptops is undeniable, other manufacturers like ARM, Texas Instruments and Nvidia have taken up huge chunks of this incredibly growing market.

Recently Intel provided reference design smartphones and tablets to various manufacturer with their ‘Medfield’ processor powering Android Gingerbread. ”We expect products based on these to be announced in the first half of 2012,” said Stephen Smith, vice president of Intel’s architecture group to Technology Review who were lucky enough to check out the prototype in person.

“The phone was powerful and pleasing to use, on a par with the latest iPhone and Android handsets. It could play Blu-Ray-quality video and stream it to a TV if desired; Web browsing was smooth and fast. Smith says Intel has built circuits into the Medfield chip specifically to speed up Android apps and Web browsing.” Apparently the Medfield was optimized to improve the browsing experience on Android smartphones, as well as running apps faster.

As far as the Medfield powered tablet is concerned, it was seen running Android Ice Cream Sandwich. While the screen size was slightly larger than the iPad 2, it was just as thin and light. “They can use as much or as little of the reference design as they like,” says Smith.

“This is our first offering that’s truly a single chip,” says Smith. The 32nm process is smaller than the currently popular 40nm process used by ARM processors, which means the Medfield runs much cooler and with lesser energy draw than its current competitors.

We will probably start production prototypes from various manufacturers as early as next month during CES, with large scale retail units out in the next 6 to 7 months. Could, the Medfield powered Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet be the one hinted by Eric Schmidt as Google’s tablet of choice coming out in the next 6 months?

Google’s platform chief, Andy Rubin, made a post on his Google+ profile that there are 700,000 Android smartphones being activated everyday.

That’s a ridiculously large number, especially considering that just in Feb Eric Schmidt reported the daily activation number as 350k. In July this figure jumped to 500k activations every day.  In a mere 10 months the number of Android devices being activated daily has literally doubled. But what exactly does activation of an Android handset mean?

For those inquiring minds Andy wrote, ”…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.“

That’s what I tried to tell her her anyway, to write this article for me, because it is a she isn’t it-that new voice control system that comes with Apple’s iPhone 4S? The name Siri doesn’t really give away the gender and the default voice is female, so let’s sick to that.

The day will come, although it’s still quite far away, when I can tell Siri to write a 500 word article on a particular topic and she will do just that. And I suspect I will get to experience that before I die, or at least I hope so.

Since iPhone 4S officially is just about to go on sale in UAE by both du and Etisalat, I guess many of you will be trying out Siri soon. Unfortunately, I suspect that the result will be varied.

Not my first attempt

I’ve dabbled with voice control and voice recognition before. In the early 90s I owned a Macintosh Quadra 660AV, which had something called PlainTalk. This was basically a simple system for speech control. You spoke into a special microphone and said things like “open window” and other similarly simple things.

Considering how long ago this was, it was really cool and it was always impressive to demonstrate to others. I could really say “get a Mac” to anyone who went “cool” when they saw how it worked. But as cool as it may have been, in the end, it was practically useless.

Since then I’ve used speech recognition a few times, trying to dictate to the computer and have had varied success. Most of the time, after going through the prescribed training of the software, it’s worked okay. With that I mean it understood most of what I’ve spoke, but there were enough issues to manually correct that it turned out to be a bit unproductive. To be fair, I’ve not had the patience to stick to one solution for very long.

Some people argue that it’s only with time that speech recognition becomes really good. That may be so, but with a mouse, keyboard and touch, I don’t have to train the computer and the software – it just works. And isn’t that how it should be?

Siri is clever

In my experience, so far nothing has come even close to being as clever and accurate as Siri.

Bless her heart, she doesn’t alway get my growling accent and when I’m in too much of a hurry she just packs up and leaves. But for the most part she works hard and tries to interpret my wishes. For Siri it’s truly a case of “your wish is my command.”

And back to the topic of Siri writing this article. I guess she could have, but it is actually me typing it on my Mac. First, Siri has to get much, much better at understanding continuous human speech. Once that’s working, I could dictate to her. Then comes the next part where she would have to come up with the text herself.

That’s a nut that no one has cracked yet and we’ll have to see much more developments from speech recognition and artificial intelligence before we arrive at something that smart.

Picture credit Witness Design.